Need help with Identity validation for Azure Trusted Signing

Question

Hello,

i need some help with the Identity validation which keeps failing.

These are the IDs:

04291dfb-68ed-4aa7-ab65-7671096507ea

5f08bd23-c84e-41c0-bf52-f55b505b0a97

There are two more but for those i messed up the email verification.

As the requests are denied without any feedback i'm not sure what i'm doing wrong.

First of all i'm not sure if i am providing the correct information under Tax-ID.

The Business is located in Germany and i'm not sure if i have to put the German "Steuernummer" or the "Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer" as the input-field accepts both. Maybe i need to use something different?

Secondly i am aware that there is a requirement that the Business needs to be at least three years old.

The Issue is that the Company was restructured into a Holding and Subsidiary two years ago and the Holding is now the Entity with a 10 years of tax history while the Subsidiary only has two.

As i don't get feedback what the reason for the failed verification is and it fails without me being able to provide any additional information i'm not really sure what to do. I would prefer to sign with the Identity of the Subsidiary but if that is not possible i can also try again with the Identity of the Holding (or only the Tax-ID maybe?).

I would really like to use the Azure Trusted Signing Service so any help is greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

Hi Timo,

We've seen this issue come up at other customer projects, so here’s what we suggest based on those experiences:

For the Tax-ID field, both the "Steuernummer" and the "Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer" (VAT ID) are typically accepted, but in most cases, using the VAT ID tends to work best, especially for EU-related business activities. We've found that when the process involves cross-border transactions or EU-level identification, the VAT ID is usually the safer bet.

As for the business age requirement, the Azure Trusted Signing Service seems to require at least three years of operational history. Since your company was restructured into a holding and subsidiary two years ago, this could explain why the subsidiary’s identity keeps getting rejected. We’ve had customers in similar situations who had to use the holding company’s identity to meet the three-year minimum. Given that the holding has 10 years of tax history, it might be worth trying to submit the holding’s details instead.

Also, make sure that all fields are filled out accurately—sometimes even minor mismatches (like names or addresses) can trigger a rejection. If the email verification failed for some of the submissions, it’s important to get those emails confirmed before trying again.

If the verification continues to fail, reaching out to Azure Support has helped in past projects. They were able to provide more specific reasons for the rejection, allowing the issue to be resolved faster.

In some customer projects, providing supporting documents that explain a business restructuring has also helped clear up confusion when companies went through similar changes.

I hope this helps, if you have any queries please let me know.